Kernel Mode Linux: Toward an Operating System Protected by a Type Theory

Maeda, Toshiyuki; Yonezawa, Akinori

doi:10.1007/978-3-540-40965-6_2

Cited by 12 publications

(7 citation statements)

References 13 publications

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“…Kernel Mode Linux [42] is an existing patch to Linux that enables normal user processes to run in kernel mode, and call kernel routines directly without any expensive privilege transitions or context switches during system calls. Yet they are processes that, unlike kernel modules, do not require any change to the programming model and can take advantage of all system services for normal processes such as paging or scheduling.…”

Section: Eliminating System Call Overheadmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Though we do not propose a general solution for specialization, we specialize Lupine through the kernel's Kconfig mechanisms by (1) eliminating functionality from the kernel that is not necessary for the unikernel domain (e.g., support for hardware devices or multiprocessing) and (2) tailoring the kernel as much as possible to the particular application. Lupine eliminates system call overhead by running the application in the same privilege domain as the kernel via the existing (but not upstream) Kernel Mode Linux (KML) [42] patch.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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A Linux in unikernel clothing

Kuo

Williams

Koller³

et al. 2020

Proceedings of the Fifteenth European Conference on Computer Systems

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Unikernels leverage library OS architectures to run isolated workloads on the cloud. They have garnered attention in part due to their promised performance characteristics such as small image size, fast boot time, low memory footprint and application performance. However, those that aimed at generality fall short of the application compatibility, robustness and, more importantly, community that is available for Linux. In this paper, we describe and evaluate Lupine Linux, a standard Linux system that-through kernel configuration specialization and system call overhead elimination-achieves unikernel-like performance, in fact outperforming at least one reference unikernel in all of the above dimensions. At the same time, Lupine can run any application (since it is Linux) when faced with more general workloads, whereas many unikernels simply crash. We demonstrate a graceful degradation of unikernel-like performance properties.

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Section: Eliminating System Call Overheadmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

A Linux in unikernel clothing

Kuo

Williams

Koller³

et al. 2020

Proceedings of the Fifteenth European Conference on Computer Systems

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show abstract

“…Two approaches to avoid ring transitions are 1) integrating applications into the kernel as a Linux kernel module, and 2) allowing unmodified applications to run in ring zero along with the kernel [3,23]. Both of these approaches preserve the full functionality of Linux, while allowing one or more applications to be optimized.…”

Section: Key Goals and Possible Approachesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Unikernels

Raza

Sohal

Cadden

et al. 2019

Proceedings of the Workshop on Hot Topics in Operating Systems

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Unikernels have demonstrated enormous advantages over Linux in many important domains, causing some to propose that the days of Linux's dominance may be coming to an end. On the contrary, we believe that unikernels' advantages represent the next natural evolution for Linux, as it can adopt the best ideas from the unikernel approach and, along with its battle-tested codebase and large open source community, continue to dominate. In this paper, we posit that an upstreamable unikernel target is achievable from the Linux kernel, and, through an early Linux unikernel prototype, demonstrate that some simple changes can bring dramatic performance advantages.

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“…Making post-design changes to these high-level safety decisions is very difficult to implement. For instance, removing the user/kernel separation [59] requires a lot of engineering effort, as does breaking down a process into multiple address spaces for isolation [42]. Recently, the potential safety benefits hinted by the proposal to introduce Rust components in Linux [23] are questioned by the fact that the bulk of the kernel code will remain written in a memory-unsafe language [22].…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

FlexOS: towards flexible OS isolation

Lefeuvre

Bădoiu

Jung

et al. 2022

Proceedings of the 27th ACM International Conference on Architectural Support for Programming Languages and Operating Systems

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At design time, modern operating systems are locked in a specific safety and isolation strategy that mixes one or more hardware/software protection mechanisms (e.g. user/kernel separation); revisiting these choices after deployment requires a major refactoring effort. This rigid approach shows its limits given the wide variety of modern applications' safety/performance requirements, when new hardware isolation mechanisms are rolled out, or when existing ones break.We present FlexOS, a novel OS allowing users to easily specialize the safety and isolation strategy of an OS at compilation/deployment time instead of design time. This modular LibOS is composed of finegrained components that can be isolated via a range of hardware protection mechanisms with various data sharing strategies and additional software hardening. The OS ships with an exploration technique helping the user navigate the vast safety/performance design space it unlocks. We implement a prototype of the system and demonstrate, for several applications (Redis/Nginx/SQLite), FlexOS' vast configuration space as well as the efficiency of the exploration technique: we evaluate 80 FlexOS configurations for Redis and show how that space can be probabilistically subset to the 5 safest ones under a given performance budget. We also show that, under equivalent configurations, FlexOS performs similarly or better than existing solutions which use fixed safety configurations. CCS CONCEPTS• Software and its engineering → Operating systems; • Security and privacy → Operating systems security.

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Kernel Mode Linux: Toward an Operating System Protected by a Type Theory

Cited by 12 publications

References 13 publications

A Linux in unikernel clothing

A Linux in unikernel clothing

Unikernels

FlexOS: towards flexible OS isolation

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